Embodiments according to the present invention relate to a method and a detector for detecting a possible transmission of data, which may, for instance, be employed in the field of counter espionage or to detect a possible presence of a security leak.
In the field of signal intelligence and counter eavesdropping, the challenge exists to distinguish between potentially interesting transmissions and a plurality of legal or unknown signals including drop-in signals or other noise-related or interference transmissions of electronic devices such as personal computers (PC) or the like. Interesting transmissions may, for instance, be initiated by an electronic eavesdropper in his pursuit to gather data illegally or at least against the will of the proprietors of the respective data. Corresponding transmissions may be generated, for instance, by an electronic bug, a surveillance device or other surveillance equipment.
Often, potentially interesting transmissions are detected by evaluating the field strength or intensity of a received transmission. Afterwards, it may be possible to manually evaluate the transmission in terms of its modulation scheme and its content. However, the described method is potentially time-consuming and typically necessitates expert knowledge of the person to carry out the evaluation.
Moreover, software-based automated processes for recognizing the kind of modulation used, demodulating and decoding of the signals exist. These processes and the software-based detection systems, however, are typically limited to certain signals. Such software-based processes typically comprise the drawback that they can only process signals for which they were previously programmed. In other words, in many cases, software-based automated processes are limited to known signals, which may eventually limit the applicability of the processes significantly.